A game featuring great atmosphere:
Moments of great tension, allowing one's honor to shine
Betrayal!
Moar Betrayal!
And double crossing!
Barotrauma is a sci-fi submarine simulator, set on the most famous icy moon in our Solar system, Jupiter's Europa. It's a game with a STRONG mp focus, that takes more than one page from Space Station 13 school of design but also features incredible in-depth game play mechanics. The game does have a single player campaign and, contrary to popular belief it's perfectly playable AND completable in sp. The point is, it requires a sufficiently autistic mind to be properly appreciated solo.
Other generic things you need to know before we delve deep is, the game has a sub editor, allowing anyone to modify and design ships from scratch and is also highly moddable. Plenty of great mods already expand the base experience well beyond what's initially offered here.
During game, you assume the role and control directly a single crew member. Your vision, the amount of data you get from the various systems, it's all relative to WHERE you are inside your ship. During sp you can freely switch control among all your crew members and it's very important to do so. When playing mp you assume a specific role and play at the best of your abilities (or not, 'member ss13).
The game has a hierarchy system so, for example, a captain can pretty much access all his ship's systems, rooms and containers, as can any security officer. Medics can access everything related to medicine and toxins but the ship's armory and brig will probably be forbidden to them. A mechanic, usually, cannot tamper with the nuclear fuel storage and so on. Ofc all this is easily by passable in sp but in mp it forces you to play your role or be creative.
Putting this all together means, if you wish to use your sonar, you must be present near the necessary systems with one of your crew members. You wish to shoot from a specific angle? Better have the correct periscope manned then. In sp you can ofc rely on bots, they can be ordered around and be given up to 3 different tasks, in descending order of importance. If you read the Steam forums you'll find plenty of complaints about Barotrauma's bots but that's just because the average gamer is shtoopid. Anyone that has a modicum of experience organizing a fortress of dwarves will have no issues in deciding who should be doing what, with which priority and ultimately how many crew members you need to have your chosen sub function properly (some are fuckhuge and def designed for MP shenanigans, I suggest modded subs for sp, more on that later)
The specific roles you can play as also differ in the initial level of skill (Helm, Weapons, Engineering, Mechanics, Medicine), although you can 'learn by doing' big chunks of skill increase are gated behind talents, specific for each career. Some talents can also unlock special job features (Mechanics being more efficient at disassembling, Clowns [?!] being able to breath underwater, etc) or unique blueprint, like the Cargo Scooter. An underwater scooter that has storage capacity and the ability to float in place to assist you during EVA actions. Because ofc you can exit the sub lmao. There are outposts (inhabited or abandoned), caves. monster lairs and alien ruins to explore. Or you could be just ordered out by your captain to patch a hole in the hull. It's one of those games.
As for the jobs themselves, you can play or hire Captains, Security Officers, Engineers, Mechanics, Medics and Assistants, which are jack of all trades able to grow up into truly weird but very useful characters. Like clowns.*honks*
When you're in game, your screen will look something like this:
► Show Spoiler
There's someone manning the upper aft periscope, armed with a chaingun and everyone else is dealing with faulty electronics + the water gushing in from a couple holes and the broken airlocks. This crew is about to die. The moloch will finish them before they have any chance to recover from this situation. They wasted an incredible stroke of luck (hitting the mountain top) but ignore that molochs are blind and generally peaceful. What they should do is stop shooting, turn off their sonar, turn off their frickin reactor (Hope you have enough o2 tanks or Oxygilite to drop around the sub to keep your men breathing) and wait for the thing to lose interest. Once you stop making sound you're no different than a rock for those things.
After the necessary repairs ofc it's time to give it a couple of railgun suppositories but I'm afraid they won't last this long. Yep, it's one of those games.
The game is structured around campaigns, your goal being to reach the 'center' of the moon itself. There's a pretty decent setting here for a game of this scope, different factions you can be allied or enemy with and a number of different kind of missions, some given, other free form, that you can perform along the way to gather resources, credit and reputation. You move from location to location performing said task along the way, the journey is more important than the destination:
► Show Spoiler
I also like to strap c4 charges or dirty bombs on my railgun shells in those cases because fuck you! Yes, you can do that. I told you it's one of those games.
I could spend a few more thousand words on this, really. I could for example tell you how I got the idea to jury rig a proximity sensor system for my sub, connected to an electric coil that automatically discharges, shocking monsters getting too close and how the whole thing started from me wanting to add motion sensors to my inner doors, as I was tired of clicking to open them each time. I could do that but I'm afraid it would just put me on another creativity tangent. There are endless anecdotes I could tell and not enough time to write them all. It's one of those fucking games.
Tl:dr: should you buy Barotrauma?
Answer: No
Dafuq?
Playing Barotrauma sp is for madmen that get a boner from proper inventory management, true resource allocation, memorizing timing for shit and stuff and a load of things normal people find 'boring'. A properly manned sub, even when piloted by a single human player + bots is perfectly capable of dealing with any situation the game can throw at you. Problem is, would you enjoy a game where you must ponder the correct storage solution for your oxygen masks? Decide how many batteries is too many? Check before each departure that every member of your crew is properly equipped, swap out used tanks and replenish ammo?
Bots can do a lot by themselves, they sort things around autonomously, take care of maintenance and are generally able to stay alive (eg a bot that's given the command to fix leaks won't jump into a fire to do that) but you must make sure everything else works and is in the proper place. Enough fire extinguishers? Are they properly spread out for the assigned bot to always have one close by, in case of fire? And so on, you get the gist. It's one of those games.
A modded sub can alleviate a lot of the chores in sp. Some are OP af but there are plenty offering QOL features like, external elevators to quickly drop cargo and reduce the number of trips needed to loot a location or shuttles to navigate into narrow spaces, drones to explore and destroy nests and so on. You'll need to find your sweet spot here but asking around always brings up some legit well designed ships that feel convenient without being a cheat.
What you should do is have a look into it. If anything of what I wrote above piques your interest. Look into the MP scene, it's chaotic and fun but also smart and deep enough to give you great sense of accomplishment, when you save a doomed crew from an impossible situation. Or betray and troll someone to death.
Rigging a detonator to explode when a door is triggered or when a captain orders a sub to descent is easy af, start from there (hint: procuring the tools is the hard part)
